After two centuries, a dairy farm family near East Palestine worries for the future
When the Leslie family’s ancestors first started plowing this land, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams still had over a decade of post-presidency to enjoy, and Abraham Lincoln was a small child living on the edge of poverty in Hodgenville, Ky.
Tina Leslie explains that her family’s 200-acre Lawrence County dairy farm originally was a land grant given to a veteran of the American Revolution to compensate for the devaluation of the currency used to pay soldiers during the war. “The land was purchased by my husband Howard Leslie’s family in 1815,” she explained.
“We still farm most of the original 200, give or take a few acres,” she said, adding that today, most of the work is done by her son, Alex, and his wife, Amanda — something Tina and her husband did for over 30 years until their recent retirement.
But ask any farming family, including the Leslies, and they’ll tell you: They never really retire.
The sprawling dairy farm sits right where Beaver and Lawrence counties converge with the Ohio state line, which placed them right in the path of the black cloud that rose over East Palestine, Ohio, a month ago, when Norfolk Southern convinced the governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania that the only way to avert a worse catastrophe was a controlled burn of toxic chemicals.
“I was sitting in my living room, and I have these long windows that face south, and I just happened to look up — and you could see these dark clouds rolling in that had the look of an ominous storm,” she recalled.
She recalls her husband turning to her saying, “Boy, it got really dark out.”
Tina said she went outside to let the dogs out, but also to get a better feel for the situation — and she stopped dead in her tracks. “It was the strangest thing; it turned pitch dark, and I couldn’t hear anything. There was no sound. Almost like the sound of when it snows that wet snow and you can’t hear sound,” she said.
The family discussed leaving — her son’s house is on the same property — but decided instead to make sure everything was sealed
tight and hunker down.
When they got up the next morning, everything seemed to be okay — but they’ve felt uneasy ever since.
The Leslies take great pride in being from Enon Valley. In the early days of Pennsylvania, this area was entirely agrarian and part of the Depreciation Lands that were given to Revolutionary War soldiers. Lawrence County was carved out from parts of Beaver and Mercer counties in 1849; before that, Beaver County had been created in 1800 from parts of Allegheny and Washington counties.
In 1851, the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago railroads built a train station in this sleepy town, and for a minute it became a transportation hub for the entire region. A large general store was built, along with two hotels, a distillery, a roundhouse, a repair shop and a broom factory.
While the hub eventually shifted elsewhere, the tracks and the longlongwhistle of the trains bringing goods through the area never left. Tina says her father was the child of Italian immigrants who were part of the next wave of residents who settled here and worked on the railroad.
The Norfolk Southern train that derailed in East Palestine was traveling to a rail yard in Beaver County that night, and left the tracks just moments before reaching this Lawrence County borough.
“People stay here because they feel a sense of place,” said Tina, 64, who along with her husband has raised three children here: Nathan, who is both a minister and the mayor of a neighboring town; Alex, the agricultural engineer now running the farm with his wife Amanda, a nurse; and daughter Sarah, who lives in suburban Pittsburgh with her family.
The Leslie dairy farm has over 40 cows that Alex now milks since he and Amanda took over the farm a couple of years ago. Everyone still chips in, though, to get the milk to the nearby dairy for consumers. Alex also works at a local orchard year-round, and when Tina and Howard ran the farm, Howard spent 39 years doing double duty as the vo-ag teacher at Blackhawk School District until the FFA, formerly known as the Future Farmers of America, discontinued it due to budget cuts in 2012.
“You have to have other jobs outside the farm to make ends meet,” Tina explains of the unpredictability of farming, a result of milk prices changing all the time and other outside forces like the weather and consumer trends.
The family successfully switched to seasonal milking a couple of years ago; seasonal milking is a cycle that begins with calving in March, followed by breeding in the summer, then ongoing milking until December, when the cows are dried up and everyone takes the winter off until March.
Since the toxic burn, Tina said, she is worried about the soil: “Our cows are about to go out to pasture very shortly, and you’re just afraid whether there’s any residue on there — or if it has penetrated deeper — because we obviously don’t want our cows to be eating anything that could be poisonous and then go in the milk, and then we’re shipping milk, and then we’re giving that to consumers.”
Since the day after the derailment, farmers here and across the border in
Ohio have been pressuring local community leaders along with elected officials, Norfolk Southern and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to expand the sampling radius for testing for dioxins and other chemical contaminants.
Overall farming is a big economic driver here: Beaver County’s 707 farms generate more than $23 million in annual sales; Lawrence County’s 587 farms generate more than $34 million. The ones within the cloud of the controlled burn want to make certain their farm produce is safe for consumers — and they want to be compensated if their land and livelihood has been compromised.
Tina said she asked her son Alex right away if they wanted to get the soil tested, and he never hesitated: “He said ‘I don’t want to sell something to somebody if it’s going to harm them.’ And I thought, that’s the right answer. That’s the absolute right answer.”
When the tests became available last week, the Leslies went to Darlington to
sign up to have their ground tested. “They said it would take three weeks or more until they would get to us, then — lo and behold — they stopped at our house yesterday to test the soil,” she said.
It will be weeks before they get the results, so the uncertainty continues. Meanwhile, outside of local media, the national press has largely evaporated since President Biden said he would not come to the region and talk to the people.
Farming in Pennsylvania is the pillar of the commonwealth’s economy and heritage, and despite all the usual uncertainties that impact farmers — trade, weather, politics — there are still over 52,000 family farms that work over 7 million acres of Pennsylvania land.
Despite employing over 280,000 people and despite a direct economic output of nearly $85 billion, farmers still have little political power in Washington, mainly because farmland is sparsely populated — fewer people,
fewer votes.
In addition to the fear of not knowing what is in their water and their soil, Tina said another fear is being a casualty of geography.
“My heart just breaks for the people of East Palestine, because I don’t even think they have any clue how devastating this really is. I mean, I think some people do. Some people don’t. And some people don’t want to know.”